Born in Bethany, Jerusalem, on 1 May 1909; schooled in Bethany and two years in the Frères College in Jerusalem; close to Mufti Haj Amin Al-Husseini, who assigned him during the Arab Revolt of 1936 to assassinate British District Governor Hugh Foot, a mission he failed to carry out after British military intelligence discovered the plot (Foot, later known as Lord Caradon, authored UN Resolution 242 in 1967); opened together with two friends the Orient Taxi Company, through which he met many journalists to which the Mufti asked him to explain the Palestinian cause; then became a journalist himself, working as assistant to Daily Mail Correspondent O’Dowd Callagher; was sacked by the Daily Mail for withholding information about the bombing of the Palestine Post in 1948 while using it to boost his reports; assistant correspondent to the New York Times in Beirut; moved to work with Newsweek after being asked to open its bureau in Beirut; switched to Time Magazine in 1952; was arrested by Lebanese authorities in 1963 under allegations of an attempted coup d’état in Beirut but released after charges were dropped; retired from Time in 1989 and moved to Seattle, US, to live with one of his sons; died there on 3 May 2005.